APRIL 2020 81from power seven years earlier and whom the young
men ridiculed for the court’s amusement.
As The Mirror & the Light opens, Cromwell is back
at the scene of the execution. Anne’s body “swims in a
pool of fluid crimson,” and he seems his usual hearty
self, thinking about his second breakfast. In the back-
ground, however, Mantel is darkening the mood. In
the previous novel, Anne’s attendants, veiled so as not
to be tainted by association with her death, used their
bodies to block the men approaching the corpse. “We
do not want men to handle her,” they said. Now the
shrouded women are silent, stylized; they force the men
back with palms upturned. They could be dancers in a
Greek chorus, or the Furies.
Beneath his bluster, Cromwell feels uneasy. When
Anne had climbed the scaffold a few moments earlier,
he’d found himself admiring her poise. But now other
men make crude remarks. These offend him—he who
planted the filthy thoughts in their head. “I’d have put
her on a dunghill,” says Charles Brandon, the Duke of
Suffolk. “And the brother underneath her.” Cromwell
berates Brandon for lacking mercy. “By God,” says the
duke, a rival. “You read me a lesson? I? A peer of the
realm? And you, from the place where you come from?”
Cromwell spits out: “I stand just where the king has put
me.” Then he asks himself, “Cromwell, what are you
doing?” But he waves away his disquiet: “If you cannot
speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?”
Thomas Cromwell, speaking truth to a man who
could harm him? We weren’t expecting that, and as will
become clear, now is not the moment to be imprudent.
The Mirror & the Light covers four years of Cromwell’s
life, from 1536 to 1540. He is at the peak of his career.
The king has made him a baron and appointed him the
lord keeper of the privy seal, an office that gives him
even more access to the king. Henry has also let him
hold on to the titles of master secretary and vicegerent,
a powerful new position in the English Church. “It
is a thing never seen before,” says Queen Jane. “Lord
Cromwell is the government, and the church as well.”
Cromwell does what he did earlier, a manic whirl of
endeavors that include filling the king’s coffers with
revenue from monasteries confiscated from the Vati-
can and trying to reinforce England’s independence
from the pope. His “cause,” as he calls it, is to publish
a translation of the Bible. Everyone in the king’s realm
should be able to read the Bible in English—if only
to see what isn’t in it: popes, monks, counterfeit relics
used by priests to fleece the poor.
Cromwell’s main duty, as ever, is to keep the king
happy. That entails managing Henry’s volatile emotions:
anxiety about begetting a legitimate male heir, shame at
growing old and obese, eruptions of self-pity. For once,
the king has no qualms about his queen, but Jane’s
tenure is, for Henry and his people, heartbreakingly
brief. Cromwell soon has to scour Europe for a bride
who both suits Henry’s tastes and is willing to marry
an aging, bloated monarch who cast off one queen and
killed another. This is as difficult as it sounds.
Cromwell has other problems. A large rebellion
has broken out in the north, but the casus belli is not
Henry. It’s him, Cromwell, with his low birth, anti-
papistry, and suspiciously Jewish-seeming aptitude for
making money. The depth of the public’s hatred makes
him vulnerable. Is the king annoyed? Are his friends still
his friends? Has the king understood Cromwell’s com-
mitment to the new evangelicalism (i.e., Protestantism)?
Another, more serious source of strain in the
minister -king relationship is in danger of becoming
apparent: Henry has grown bloodthirsty. Cromwell
pleads for lives, but when he fails, he gets the blame.
“The king never does an unpleasant thing,” notes Queen
Jane. “Lord Cromwell does it for him.” Worse, he’s
having a hard time suppressing his disgust for Henry.
Cromwell rehearses the catechism of sacred kingship,
but elevated thoughts all too quickly turn gross. Con-
templating the king as the embodiment of the state,
which makes his very “piss and stool ... the property
of all England,” Cromwell envisions Henry’s doctors
carrying away the bedpan of royal shit every morning.
Cromwell’s dislike bursts into the open when it seems
possible that the king will return to the Church. “Even
if Henry does turn, I will not turn,” he tells a woman he
considers an ally. “I am not too old to take a sword in
my hand.” This is the most disloyal statement Cromwell
ever makes, and it will not be forgotten.Mantel has been praised for upending a centu-
ries-old consensus that Cromwell was a man driven
only by greed and lust for power. Partial credit for
her revisionism goes to a historian named Geoffrey
Elton, from whom Mantel takes her cues. Younger
scholars have chipped away at Elton’s reassessment,
but Mantel stands by her source. Their Cromwell is
a true evangelical, a great statesman, and an advocate
of good governance. He laid the groundwork for the
English Reformation, created the bureaucratic state,
empowered Parliament, and fought for hospitals, poor
laws, and a census, among other admirable causes.
But that’s Cromwell the public figure. Mantel’s chal-
lenge is to give him an inner life. In a Paris Review inter-
view in 2015, six years after Wolf Hall was published,
she described the moment he came into focus. She sat
down to write, and out flowed the first paragraphs of
the series. The boy Cromwell is being beaten nearly to
death by his crazed father. The ferocity of the assault is
conveyed by a detailed sketch of footwear: “The stitch-
ing of his father’s boot is unraveling. The twine has
sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has
caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.” ThenCromwell’s
angle of vision
on his late-
medieval
world is oddly
familiar, even
if his Tudor
mores are
alien. We
can identify.